This is something that I wrote on Google+ in response to this article and I felt it was worth reproducing here.

Geeks are a somewhat insulated community and while they often trot out the “I’ve been persecuted” thing (and it’s often something very real that they’ve experienced elsewhere), it’s not something they are generally dealing with inside of that insulated community.

Geeks may have been picked on in high school, looked at funny or laughed at in college, etc., but when they are together as geeks they can appreciate each other’s geekiness and generally don’t pick on each other for it. Walk around GenCon and you’ll see that for the most part, even strangers are sharing their love of whatever game or anime or science fiction series with each other, not laughing at each other for those very things.

Female geeks, however, are not afforded that same respect. They get treated like they don’t understand the most basic of things, like they couldn’t possibly appreciate the awesomeness or complexities of whatever it is they are passionate about and, often, like what they like is “cute” or somehow lesser than what “real” geeks like. Even when it isn’t so explicit, there is a distinct feeling of being a second-class citizen within the community.

Female geeks often experience the very kinds of prejudice and outsiderness inside the community that the geek community so reviles when someone outside the community does it to one of them.

How is the pillar effect that girl geeks experience substantially different than when the popular crowd is nice to the nerd in high school in order to get homework help, but never really invites him to the parties or lets him sit at their lunch table?

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